Homicide Watch D.C. Seeks Funding While Founder Studies at Harvard

The Homicide Watch D.C. website, which reports on every homicide in Washington, D.C., from the crime itself through the pursuit of suspects and the cases' path through the courts, will be in limbo temporarily while founder Laura Amico starts a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University next month, reports Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman says the site has “been lauded for its devotion to blanket coverage and for its ability to build communities of interest around the kind of crime stories that might get a few inches of coverage — if that — in the local daily. As the site's tagline puts it: ‘Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.’ “

Laura Amico and her husband, Chris, who helps operate the site, hold out hope that the site's hiatus will be brief and that its reporting can be sustained while they're in Boston. They have launched a $40,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign. “What we want to do is bring on paid interns — five throughout the course of one calendar year — and turn operation of the site over to them, with guidance from Chris and myself,” Amico tells Nieman Journalism Lab. “Everything from the daily reporting to the database entry to monitoring comments, keeping track of cases, year-in-review stories, investigative reports.”

Read Next

Homicide Watch D.C., what the Washington Post calls “a much-praised combination of true crime blog, case log, document dump and victim memorial,” is closing tomorrow after chronicling hundreds of murders over the past four years. Everyone from Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier to victims' family members is lamenting the site's demise.

Comments are closed.

TCR AT A GLANCE

The award honors individuals in the media or media-related fields who have advanced national understanding on the 21st century challenges of criminal justice. It will be presented Feb 16, 2017 at a dinner at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"Prescription opioid misuse and use of heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl are intertwined and deeply troubling problems," says director Tom Frieden of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The heroin-related death total topped the number of gun homicides by 10 cases.

Ronald Bert Smith Jr. was pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m. His attorneys asked the Supreme Court to hear the case because a judge had overridden the jury's recommendation that Smith get a life prison term. Four justices voted to delay the execution, but five votes were needed to do so.

President-elect visits Columbus to meet with first responders and victims in campus incident involving man who drove his car into a crowd and then attacked people with a butcher knife. Trump didn't discuss the assailant, whom he had called “a Somali refugee who should not have been in our country.”

The public is entitled to see virtually all Ohio police dash-cam recordings. the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 7-0, reports the Columbus Dispatch. The court rejected the Ohio State Highway Patrol’s attempt to keep all such recordings secret, even those pointed at an empty back seat or the median of an interstate highway. In its first […]